Fantasy Football 2012, Rendered in GIFs: The Losers’ Edition

There are probably quite a few of you out there who have not looked at your fantasy roster in a while. The possible reasons for this neglect are many – maybe you’re on a kibbutz; maybe your puggle took sick; maybe you forgot to pay your Internet bill a few months in a row; maybe you are in jail. But the overwhelming, odds-on most likely reason that you haven’t checked up on your roster is because it stinks, and you are out of the playoffs. You’re not just checked out. You are this guy:

And do you know why you are that guy? Because you drafted Greg Jennings, okay? Greg Jennings was supposed to be MONEY. He was supposed to be scrilla-green cash moh-nay, okay? Instead, he suffered some random knee injury that somehow kept him out for the entire freaking season, one week at a time. You wanna know what it was like to have Greg Jennings this year? This is what it was like to have Greg Jennings this year:

And that wasn’t great. It really wasn’t. Seeing Smelfy Old Spice, Esq. listed as out week after week after week was a bummer. It was a little like being trapped, honestly, not knowing when that knee would magically cease to ail. But injuries are part of the game, right? Everybody on that field is just one play away, right?

Kind of. See, if you drafted a guy like Pierre Garçon, or a quarterback like Ben Roethlisberger, you were doing more than just acknowledging that players sometimes get hurt. Instead, you were engaging in a kind of masochistic doubling down, one that may have felt very naughty and dangerous at the time (and…maybe…a little arousing..?), but one that definitely just looked kinda stupid once your draft was over. And so on that morning when you set your lineup and you remember that Big Ben is out with a broken torso, you probably reflected on your earlier risk-taking like this:

And that probably cost you a couple weeks. But that’s okay! That happens. QBs like Big Ben are replaceable (from a fantasy perspective, anyway), and most other guys – your Garçons, par exemple – were just failed attempts at striking mid-round gold.

But let’s get back to the highly drafted failures, shall we? Like all you poor schmucks out there who drafted Jamaal Charles and expected something resembling steady production. Instead, we got feast, and then we got famine. And we found it impossible to trade the man, because those feasts sure were delicious. But there were not enough of these feasts, and so we spent the season stuck, mostly losing, and feeling mighty unhappy about it:

Jamaal, like the rest of his teammates, never really got it together this season. Unfortunately, Chris Johnson did get it together at the end, right after most of us had either traded or dropped him in disgust. For the lucky few that held onto the guy, his late-season production might have made up the experience into a net positive. But that still doesn’t make up for the near heart attack he put us through:

Chris Johnson wasn’t the only guy who subjected us to these swerves. But there was something about seeing the guys we picked do poorly, and seeing the guys we dropped go HAM, that just felt kinda unjust, y’know? And not in some petty way. In a cosmic way! What kind of God would allow this to happen? The same God that allows this to happen, apparently:

What a season this has been. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, that’s for sure. Check back next week to find out what we learned!